Mayor Bill de Blasio and his schools chancellor Richard Carranza want more black and Hispanic students enrolled in New York City’s selective schools. Their diversity proposals seek to reverse Asian and white prevalence on account of test-based admissions. Despite escalating criticism, to do so, they are retreating from school choice and entrance policies put in place during the Michael Bloomberg years.

Two weeks ago, irate Asian parents in Brooklyn jeered department of education flak catchers trying to pitch the diversity plan. One protester said, “instead of fixing broken schools, they want to break the ones that are working.” A recent Manhattan Institute study reiterated the folly of race- and ability-mixing to close the “racial achievement gap,” concluding that “educational opportunities for black and Hispanic students need to move beyond racial integration efforts.”

While the mayor himself avoids the inflammatory word segregation, his chancellor and TheNew York Times editors pushing his agenda do not. In this case segregation is not legally enforced separation by race but the unwanted consequence of merit-based admissions.

Carranza positions himself as a “man of color” acting to dismantle a grossly segregated school system. Born and raised in Tucson, Arizona, he was appointed San Francisco’s deputy superintendent of instruction, innovation, and social justice in 2009. He became the city’s superintendent, and then for 18 months, Houston’s school chief. When de Blasio’s first pick for chancellor mysteriously backed out nine months ago, Carranza filled the vacancy. His academic qualifications are spare. The sole published article on his résumé is titled, “Mariachi Instruction in Support of Literacy.” (Carranza is a mariachi guitarist of note and makes much of it.)

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The city’s performance differentials by school and race are vast. From early grades until junior high school, Asian and white students consistently outpace blacks and Hispanics on reading and math tests, earning more choice in school selection. As a result, Asian and white kids cluster in demanding schools where black and Hispanic enrollments remain low. New York Post columnist Karol Markowicz points out that these islands of scholastic quality have acted to prevent white flight and attract parents who once reflexively opted out of the public system. Parents who opposed admissions changes on the Upper West Side earlier this year were called out and shamed as bigots.

Last spring, de Blasio went after highly competitive high schools such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, seeking to scrap admissions exams. He took on sought-after middle schools on the Upper West Side’s District 3. His high school proposal has stalled, but starting in 2019, District 3 will set aside 25 percent of sixth grade seats for its least proficient, lowest income children. Faculties will receive “implicit bias training and professional development to help them meet the needs of all students,” the district has announced.

Brooklyn’s District 15’s middle schools have been a more recent target. For diversity forces, the district—which includes the gentrified Park Slope neighborhood—epitomizes citywide segregation. About 81 percent of its white middle school students attend three schools, while 53 percent of its total middle school enrollment is black or Latino.

According to District 15’s diversity plan, which is nominally parent driven, 11 middle schools will abandon competitive entrance criteria—grades, test scores, and attendance—and replace them with a weighted lottery system. They will reserve roughly half of all seats in each school for children who are low-income, homeless, or learning English. To balance races and make room at the top, able children seeking admissions to better schools will get bounced into the cellar. As part of the equalizing effort, arts-based New Voices School of Academic and Creative Arts will stop holding talent-based auditions. Of New Voices’ 600 current students, 52 percent are white, 33 percent are Hispanic, 7 percent are black, and 5 percent are Asian.

New York City’s “admissions process presents itself as a system of choice and meritocracy, but it functions as a system for hoarding privilege,” councilman Brad Lander professes, adding grotesquely, “my family has benefited from that privilege.” A University of Chicago graduate, Lander is responding to rising anti-white political feeling in the boroughs. A man of intense ambition, he is married to activist lawyer Meg Barnette, chief of staff and general counsel at Planned Parenthood NYC. Critics point out that Lander’s and Barnette’s own children—along with de Blasio’s—attended the whitest, highest performing, most exclusive middle school in District 15, one of the three schools under fire.

Keep in mind that New York’s education complex, when compared to ordinary school districts perhaps one one-hundredth the size, strains the imagination. It encompasses 1,700 separate schools and oversees more than a million children. Forty percent of them live in households where a language other than English is spoken. Roughly 40 percent are Hispanic and another 25 percent black. The remaining third is split evenly between Asians and whites. The upper professional class and mega-rich deserted the system long ago, as did many Catholics and Jews. More than 100,000 New York City children attend yeshiva.

Necessarily, many New York public schools are extensions of state welfare systems. The really damaged kids—the heartbreakers and the throwaways, the deranged and the dangerous—are given over to social workers, foster parents, or the police. Much school business in the cellar is devoted to dealing with outside-of-school social tragedies. Some kids have nowhere else to go for food, heat, and daytime human contact. Police and everyone else want the hard cases kept off city streets and buses.

In his unsparing 2016 profile of a New York City high school, The Battle for Room 314, Ed Boland draws a grim portrait of the city’s educational cellar. Students at the low end have never read a real book and never will. They cannot do simple arithmetic or write a sentence. They have no grasp of the government that likely provides their housing, food, and medical care. Loosened from stigma and shame, many grow up in world of brutality, amorality, and chaos. What if girls have children out of wedlock at 16? If boys think selling dime bags is an easier way to make a living than working at Burger King? Who and what are going to fix that?

Trapped inside the hard-left reasoning that monopolizes New York’s education and philanthropic establishment, Boland blames inequality, white privilege, racism, and lack of opportunity for the mess. “End poverty, the root of educational failure,” he concludes, desperate for an endnote.

Attentive parents of all races do anything to avoid Room 314, and the minimal standards, coarse behavior, half-educated teachers, and parking lot classrooms that come with the package. They boycott schools ringed with graffiti, barbed wire, television security cameras, and metal detectors. Private schools, special public schools, “magnet” programs, and charters—in New York they are of very mixed quality—fill the bill for some children, though not enough.

Manhattan’s District 3 and Brooklyn’s District 15 overflow with educationally ambitious parents who are neither poor nor struggling. Most districts do not. Mixing students of vastly different learning abilities doesn’t work. It’s humiliating for slow learners and non-English speakers. Instruction slows down and tensions rise. If their child’s school suddenly fills up with disabled, troubled, and delinquent children—or if learning grinds to a halt—functioning parents bolt.

Should it be carried out, New York’s diversity plan—redolent of racial politics—will have a modest impact on its intended minorities and Gotham’s most admirable schools will be almost certainly be the losers. But it is unclear whether scholastic quality and excellence are even considerations in this wrongheaded, egalitarian scheme.

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39 Responses to NYC’s Doomed Plan to Racially Balance its Schools

The article, in my view, does a fine job in describing the education environment in NYC, but is silent on remedies:

What should be done for the least proficient, lowest income children, for many black and Hispanic students, for the homeless and the English learners, the “heartbreakers and the throwaways, the deranged and the dangerous”, for those who “have nowhere else to go for food, heat, and daytime human contact”, for many who “grow up in world of brutality, amorality, and chaos”, for the girls who “have children out of wedlock at 16” and the boys who “think selling dime bags is an easier way to make a living than working at Burger King”, for the “disabled, troubled, and delinquent children”?

I think most of us recognize that no school system alone is capable of curing these educational problems, social pathologies, and gross economic disparities. These problems require more comprehensive solutions. Yet, rather than just describing the problem, or just defending testing for school admission, we the people should think of solutions to these problems;

My question to Mr. Gilbert T. Sewall is:

Have you, Sir, thought of any remedies for these children as well? If so, what are they?

Implicit in all racial balancing schemes is the unstated belief that black and latino kids simply cannot get ahead if they don’t have the right amount of white kids in their classes…which if stated aloud would sound an awful lot like racism.

Unfortunately, the left is unlikely to ever come around on this, since it tends to believe in blank slatism, which implies that application of the right policies can fix whatever ails a person or society as a whole. Their entire political philosophy rests on this premise and abandoning it would be an admission that their prescriptions will never work.

There is a reason why NYC (the nation’s biggest hard-Left fortress and Democrat vote-plantation) has the most segregated schools in America: there are almost no white Christians left in the city.
Notwithstanding the way they present them to the public, the Left’s desegregation policies have always been about one objective: wrecking white Christian communities.
The Left have no problem with all-Chinese, all-Korean, all-Jewish schools as long as these groups continue to support the Left electorally and financially.

“Critics point out that Lander’s and Barnette’s own children—along with de Blasio’s—attended the whitest, highest performing, most exclusive middle school in District 15, one of the three schools under fire.”

My repeated question is “how do you integrate a system that is only 15 pct white?” What, will that smattering of white students get sprinkled out across the boros? Or will black and brown kids get bussed to Staten Island and the Upper West Side?

This is a question that is going to get asked more and more, all across the country, with the percentage varying. With the proportion of white children in steady decline, integration is either never going to happen, or it will look very different going forward (black kids being bused to Chinatown, maybe?).

As a math teacher who works for the madhouse known the NYC Department of Education, I’m very glad that TAC is giving this issue attention.

I have come to the conclusion that this system is run by people who are mentally ill and are incapable of questioning their wrong-headed policies.

They put us through all this useless training on how we teachers must overcome our “cognitive biases” to serve “students of color”. In other words, the implication is that subconsciously we are all racists and the reason why students don’t do well is because teachers supposedly treat “white” and “Asian” students differently than “students of color”.

It’s completely lost on these dotards that they are “cognitively biased” in favor of a far-left cultural Marxist ideology that goes completely unquestioned.

The education system here is a disaster, and these idiots are going to put the final nail in the coffin if they get their way.

The effort is better spent on improving the schools and conditions in which those students exist.

As for the commentary about dealing with race. The explicit ban by the constitution — came into play long after a polity and socialization placed such discrimination in place and furthermore said ban did not prevent the widespread discrimination to color across the country.

This is the subtle reverse discrimination contend which falls flat in the light of real world experience. Just several tears ago a state openly engaged in election processes in complete violation by basing its practice on skin color for voter ID.

As an advocate of voter ID, their choice was nonsensical, obvious, unnecessary and self defeating. Stop trying to pretend that color is not a deep rooted ethic in our system. It makes one appear deliberately offensive.

I realize you likely believe we have a moral obligation to find one, that there MUST be a solution, if only we can muster the political will and the money to affect it. In other words, force people what they don’t want to do and expropriate more of their money via taxation.

And then will the problem be solved?

Are the schools – the government – really going to come up with a viable answer for the “world of brutality, amorality, and chaos” these kids are being raised in? Have you ever considered that “solving” this problem may ultimately be impossible if the intact families of kids who do well (because their families are intact) vote with their feet? What, shall we make it illegal for these families to sell their homes and move, which is pretty much what you’d need to do?

And if the local population revolts against the significantly higher school taxes this would require, and votes for people who vow to lower or scuttle those taxes – should they be prohibited from doing so?

I do not see where government can or will “solve” this problem. I think we can throw millions – ultimately billions – at it and 20 or 30 years down the road, have the exact same problem, possibly worse.

In pursing the “moral imperative” of a solution, we will turn the schools into the parents/the families, we will foist the burden on intact families that frankly have held up their end of the social contract (and now we say, they have to hold ever more, bear ever more responsibility); excellence will necessarily be a casualty of egalitarianism.

President Business says: “Implicit in all racial balancing schemes is the unstated belief that black and latino kids simply cannot get ahead if they don’t have the right amount of white kids in their classes…which if stated aloud would sound an awful lot like racism.”

I don’t think this is true at all. I think the belief on the part of people interested in facial integration is that without it, black and latino kids will be provided with fewer or worse resources, crumbling buildings, second-class teachers (not necessarily true in the pre-Brown v. Board of Ed. days, and it’s a crime what happened to many of the teachers in those pre-Brown segregated “Black” schools) and second-class instructional materials. Instead of studying “Antigone,” “Beowulf” and “Macbeth” as I did in my rigorously tracked seventh grade class in an East Side of Manhattan public junior high school, they’ll be studying “Gone with the Wind” (as my younger brother did) and the young adult fiction hit of the moment, if that. That seventh grade class of mine saw some of its members, people of color and white, dropped into lower tracked classes with the next school year, I assume because they hadn’t performed as well academically.

I attended Stuyvesant High School the year it had its highest ever percentage of black students, just over 13%. What’s not mentioned in this article is the commercial cram schools and courses used by many of its current students to get into the school and its peer institutions. My junior high had a prep class for folks planning to take the exam for Stuyvesant, Bronx Science (“Ptui! Ptui!”) and Brooklyn Tech, but that was offered for free by a teacher volunteering his time.

I honestly don’t know the solution to the problem of racial integration in the schools in a society, and housing market, as racially segregated as ours. I’d like to see a “Hundred Flowers Bloom Approach,” and think back to the season of HBO’s “The Wire” in which especially at-risk kids in a Baltimore middle school were all grouped into a class that received extra attention from both local academics and the local police captain. Some of those kids moved into standard classrooms the next year, and some…did not. In the name of “fairness,” the class was disbanded and the special programming and outside attention ended. That’s one of the reasons why I don’t think simple “fairness” is a solution. “Why should my kid have to pay for college when prisoners, lawbreakers don’t?” was the argument used to pull public funding for educational programs in prisons, never mind that such programs were the best anti-recidivism tools we had. Simple fairness can end up cutting off our nose to spite our face.

One last word on funding. Conservatives will often argue against “throwing money” at a problem, with inner city public schools being Example Number One. Well, public school teachers have risen up against the decline in public funding for public education in some of the most conservative states in the Union, with widespread public support. And Bill Moyers, God bless him, had a show on PBS more than a decade ago showing what differences in public funding between poor and well-off communities looked like (the despair in the eyes of a rural white teenager who had never even used a computer was heartbreaking – Gods, that must be almost 20 years ago). I’d like to see the money go directly to the classrooms and not fund bureaucracies – it was the left in New York City that wanted to “bomb” the headquarters of the Board of Education 30, 40 and 50 years ago – but starving the schools of funds, like starving infrastructure funding, isn’t a good idea, as the peoples of Kansas and Louisiana have found out of the last eight or so years.

mike says: There is a reason why NYC (the nation’s biggest hard-Left fortress and Democrat vote-plantation) has the most segregated schools in America: there are almost no white Christians left in the city. Notwithstanding the way they present them to the public, the Left’s desegregation policies have always been about one objective: wrecking white Christian communities.”

Oh, spare me. If there are “almost no white Christians left in” New York City, it’s more likely to be because of the enormous number of apartments stripped of rent control and rent stabilization protections over the last 20+ years thanks to Republican policies (Rot in Hell, Joe Bruno!), and the also enormous number of apartments that were formerly reserved for middle income residents that are now available at market rates (e.g., Stuyvesant Town and the like). I have no doubt that many liberals and progressives have engaged in gentrification – driving black Christians out of Harlem, for instance – but that is consistent with the free market approach of the Republican, New Democrat and Conservative, Inc. punditocracy and their funders. It’s been groups on the left and tenants groups who have been fighting to preserve low- and moderate-income housing in New York, not folks on the right.

Mark VA, one solution is to place a moratorium on immigration. If 40% live in homes that do not speak English, that is insane. Secondly, we must jettison the idea that everyone will achieve equal outcomes. Liberals must acknowledge reality or they will bankrupt us all.

Fletcher V says: “My repeated question is ‘how do you integrate a system that is only 15 pct white?’ What, will that smattering of white students get sprinkled out across the boros? Or will black and brown kids get bussed to Staten Island and the Upper West Side?”

Back in the 1960’s and 70’s, black, brown, Asian AND white kids from poorer neighborhoods were bused or, as we grew up, rode the subway and mass transit buses to wealthier neighborhoods to fill the seats in their elementary and junior high schools. Parents in those poorer neighborhoods, or ones served by famously bad junior high schools (Joan of Arc, “shudder”) worked to get their kids sent to P.S. 6 and Wagner J.H.S. on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, which we attended along with mostly white middle class and upper class (just a smattering) kids from the neighborhood, as well as working class white kids from the old “East of the Third Avenue El” neighborhood that still existed, even though the Third Avenue Elevated Subway tracks were long gone. I had the good fortune to be tutored by one of those working class ladies, and have our first grade playground watched over by volunteers from among the women of that neighborhood, back when one income could support a family. I imagine all of their daughters and granddaughters are now in the workforce, whether they want to be or not, and as likely as not, working more than one job for the privilege, just like their brothers. More conservative (and New Democrat neo-liberal!) economic policy at work!

TheSnark says: “I have always been in awe of those who think the best way to uphold the Constitution’s explicit ban on racial discrimination is through policies that select people based explicitly on their race.”

Like Martin Luther King, Jr.? Because we realize that asking folks to run a race after they’ve been on a once-a-day diet of bread and water is unfair.

Your John Roberts has for over 30 years expressed the same point of view as yours, the result being a Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act. To implement his race-blind view, he only had to ignore 10,000 pages of evidence, gathered by a Republican-led Congress, that documented contemporary racial discrimination in the conduct of elections in this country during the first decade of the 21st Century. The stance that you and Chief Justice Roberts ultimately comes down to ignoring racist acts in the name of ignoring race.

Ready for the Apocalypse says: “(black kids being bused to Chinatown, maybe?).”

As Chinatown gentrifies – it’s already happening – and there are fewer Chinese-American kids available to fill the neighborhood schools, I imagine that is exactly what will happen, just to fill the seats.

Ergeneqon says: “They put us through all this useless training on how we teachers must overcome our ‘cognitive biases’ to serve ‘students of color’. In other words, the implication is that subconsciously we are all racists and the reason why students don’t do well is because teachers supposedly treat ‘white’ and ‘Asian’ students differently than ‘students of color’. It’s completely lost on these dotards that they are ‘cognitively biased’ in favor of a far-left cultural Marxist ideology that goes completely unquestioned.”

I wouldn’t completely dismiss the idea that some teachers are racist and treat black, brown and red students differently from white and yellow ones, but I loathe the whole Diversity, Inc. industry. It’s touchy-feely BS, be it liberal or “cultural Marxist” (a phrase that I think most of its supposed proponents would reject because of their rejection of Marxism itself, but that’s a topic for another time). The disciplinary process can be used (progressively, of course, says the good union man) to handle actual instances of out-and-out racism on the part of school personnel, and close supervision by principals and senior teachers should be used to correct more subtle examples of bias, low expectations or treating students differently.

EliteCommInc. says: “The effort is better spent on improving the schools and conditions in which those students exist…”Stop trying to pretend that color is not a deep rooted ethic in our system. It makes one appear deliberately offensive.”

One-and-three-quarters cheers! You lose a quarter for favoring Voter ID’s at all.

And you might not be skeptical enough of the idea that “Separate but Equal” can really work in practice for more than a small number of middle and upper class students of color.

po says: “Fix the parents. Then only you will get qualified students.”

Jobs. Good, well-paid, full-time (30-hour workweek) jobs. Unions and the creation of a vast, well-paid working class did more for this country than education ever did, and the devaluation of labor is what is driving this country into the gutter.

kgasmart says: “@ Mark VA: Have you ever considered the possibility there may BE no solution?…I do not see where government can or will ‘solve’ this problem. I think we can throw millions – ultimately billions – at it and 20 or 30 years down the road, have the exact same problem, possibly worse.”

Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid between them are largely responsible for flipping the elderly from the poorest age cohort in the country, as they were as late as 1960, I believe, to the richest. LBJ’s War on Poverty, recent studies have shown, were having a measurable effect on poverty rates while they were fully funded during his administration, and their effectiveness declined as their funding declined under subsequent administrations. For all the talk about billions and trillions spent on a “useless” War on Poverty, welfare benefits AND THE FEDERAL MINIMUM WAGE never kept up with inflation.

kgasmart says: “In pursing the ‘moral imperative’ of a solution, we will turn the schools into the parents/the families, we will foist the burden on intact families that frankly have held up their end of the social contract (and now we say, they have to hold ever more, bear ever more responsibility); excellence will necessarily be a casualty of egalitarianism.”

To Hell with a “moral imperative!” The GI Bill wasn’t passed as a moral imperative or to thank the troops for their service to the country. It was passed to keep veterans from supporting fascists and communists, as its authors have explicitly and openly stated. Schools need to be improved to turn out better citizens and, yes, better workers, and to help ameliorate the sickness of inequality that is turning this country into a modern-day Bourbon France where the social contract only goes one way.

Not as many as used to be, but there are some. There are 211 Catholic schools in NYC serving 67,004 students. In addition, there are 50 Greek Orthodox schools in New York, serving 5,043 students. There are also Protestant schools as well as a Quaker school. None of NYC private schools are publicly funded. However, many private schools offer scholarships.

“In 1995, Betty Hart and Todd Risley published a study that found that young children from low-income families hear as many as 30 million fewer words than their more affluent peers. A follow-up study examined these same children when they were in third grade and found that this “word gap” had a lasting influence on children’s performance later in life.”

The culture of the inner-city poor of ignoring, not talking and reading to children is unlikely to change. Early intervention programs like NYC’s Head Start for 3 and 4 year olds have tried makeup for the lack of parenting, but rarely work. No amount of diversity is going to solve this. It’s the parents.

“I received zero secular education from the age of 13 till the end,” Eisen said at a press conference Monday. “I repeat: zero. No English, no math, no history, no science, no social studies, no physical activity, no gym, no sports, no nothing.”

It’s amazing how the Hillary Clinton voters on the Upper East Side of Manhattan who use the public schools as if they are their own private institutions are fighting the mayor on this issue. Another example of liberal hypocrisy. The public schools should function for all children not just those who lived in privileged neighborhoods. And the poorly performing schools should not be dumping grounds for non-performing burned out teachers who are protected by tenure and the unions. What so many people want are private schools that are taxpayer funded. It doesn’t work that way. Minority children cannot afford to game the system by taking high priced courses that prepare them for tests, nor can they afford private tutors. It’s knowing how to play the game, not how intelligent one is that is the difference.

@Janwaar Bibi
“Leftists have to destroy nations in order to save them.”
Excellent nutshell encapsulation of Statism.
Re-stating it without the irony (i.e., “save”):
“Leftists have to destroy nations in order to dominate them.”
These are the only two terms that are really essential to understanding the psychology of Statism: 1) destroy 2) dominate

NYC has a high-level of involvement in the public school system, and one of the best public school systems in a major metropolitan area.

Unlike most cities, wealthy NYC residents often keep their kids in NYC public schools, and politically support them. Obviously, it is important to get them to put there kids in private schools and make sure they don’t care about school quality.

At least, that is what I would do if I were a Mongol from the Steppe and I believed I lacked the strength of numbers for my clan to rape and pillage the City.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t speak a word of English till my early teenage years;

My problem with this post is that it is long on description (rehashes problems that are already widely known to those who pay attention to education), and defends school admission testing, while offering not a hint of any alternatives that most reasonable people would find equitable;

Now, consider reader cka2nd, who looks at solutions: here at least we have something to debate, critique, and hopefully agree on. Absent such discussion, all we have now is just a defense of de facto two parallel and woefully unequal school systems;

This is what I propose: many remedies for the USA can be found by studying OECD’s key findings for the worldwide, triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) test, administered to 15 year olds;

By grappling with its USA data, which goes well beyond the testing material per se, we can set the stage for a rational search for the solutions. In my opinion, the power here lays with the people and their culture, and not predominantly with the schools, or even the government:

Thank you for mentioning the 1995 Betty Hart and Todd Risley study of the “word gap”. I’m familiar with it, and its implications for each social strata are serious and life long. It’s a truism worth repeating: words are the basic tools of thinking;

Here is one area where social media can be of great help: most kids are glued to their devices, and this gives us the opportunity expand their vocabulary thru reading, listening, and speech;

Don’t try to micro-manage student composition in schools. Stop relying on property taxes to solely fund schools. Use general revenue so that all schools have roughly the same funding per pupil. Hold teachers and administrators accountable for results. Send bad kids to reform schools if needed. Place at risk children in foster care early so they have a chance to thrive. Just a few thoughts….

@ Mark VA I believe that the best we can do for them is give them the basics. Keep them in school all year and for at least 8 hours a day. Feed them a healthy breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Segregate the uncontrollable ones in separate buildings and let them play basketball all day. Try to teach the compliant ones to speak standard English and very basic literacy and arithmetic, and maybe some life skills like keeping their voice down and being punctual. I think that is the best we can do for them and it is a lot better than what they are getting now. Maybe we can save a few.

Like cka2nd, I attended Stuyvesant back in the 60’s. (I wonder if we knew each other.) My experience there is that being surrounded by other students who were oriented to high academic achievement and who continually learned *from each other* was just as important to the high quality education as the excellent teachers. I can’t credit up-to-date facilities because back then Stuyvesant was in a very old building, and the facilities were nothing to write home about.

The children that I raised in NYC attended private schools. Had they been accepted to Stuyvesant or one of the other special schools, I would have sent them there. But we opted out of the rest of the NYC system as it existed then (90’s).

I now live in southern California and my youngest child, who is now in high school, attends a public school. I often refer to it as “the Stuyvesant of our area.” But there are some key differences, and NYC could learn something from how it is done here. The school my youngest attends has competitive admissions: you must have a clean disciplinary record and your 5th and 6th grade GPA must put you in the top 10% of your school to sit for the admissions exam (the school runs 7-12). This allows students who have attended the schools in the poorer and lower-achieving precincts of the high school district the opportunity to move into a better educational environment; they are not penalized for the poor quality education they have received up to that point. They are rewarded for making the best of it. In addition, the high school district is divided into 8 feeder districts, and each feeder district is allocated an equal number of seats. So, those who come from inferior elementary schools are competing against others from those same schools on the exam.

But that is not where it ends. You cannot throw well-prepared and poorly-prepared students into the same classes, treat them the same way, and expect good results. The school invests considerable resources in helping and supporting the students who are less well prepared on admission. There is supplementary tutoring and training in study skills available. The goal is to have a 100% graduation rate–and the goal comes very close to being achieved. Moreover, nearly 100% of the graduates go on to college, and many of them to top colleges. Indeed, the list of colleges they go to looks a lot like the list of where Stuyvesant graduates go.

So it is possible to start at grade 7, select the best students from both good and inferior schools, and produce a high-performing high school if you put the right effort into it.

How does it work in terms of diversity? Well, the school is predominantly Asian and Hispanic. My child is one of a handful of Whites. There is also a handful of Blacks. The dearth of Blacks is at least partly accounted for by their small numbers in the feeder population to begin with. The dearth of Whites is not: the Asians and Whites tend to live in the same neighborhoods and attend the same feeder schools, and the Asians are both more likely to take the exam, and more likely to get the highest scores.

I see no reason that NYC could not handle admissions to its special schools in the same way: instead of a single city-wide exam-based admission policy, open the exam to the best-achieving in each feeder school, and then allocate a certain number of slots to each feeder. And, critically, provide additional support and remediation for those who are admitted from inferior feeder schools. It may also be that this must be done at grade 7: the remedial efforts may be too late by high school when more damage has been done and hormones are surging.

It seems that we the people can come up with many sensible solutions for our education system. Now we must keep the pressure on the inertia of the education bureaucracy and the politicians (the gatekeepers) to have them enacted. Without this steady pressure, their record to date shows they will do nothing effective;

Andreas Schleicher, the man in charge of the PISA test for OECD, likes to say: “Your education today is your economy tomorrow”. This test exists primarily to provide the metrics for global businesses to help make sound investment decisions. Today, it is the human capital that is the predominant factor here. I think we should take him at his word;

OECD’s PISA data is also a gold mine of information on what works and what doesn’t in education. The laboratory that produces this information is just about the whole industrialized world. I would like to echo Andreas Schleicher, with a slight twist: Our education today is our culture tomorrow.

“One-and-three-quarters cheers! You lose a quarter for favoring Voter ID’s at all.”

I am neither pro or anti-separate but equal. I am for equal as equal as possible. I was fortunate enough to get passed dyslexia before dyslexia was a thing. I had teachers who encouraged — demand reading. my Texas history teacher and english teacher – really for me into reading. I poured into science fiction and then sadly into socio-economic issues — history, math, and writing. I will always struggle with writing and it has taken years to accept that fact, but enough to engage regardless, because it can in most likelihood only get better. I was fortunate enough to have a teacher or two who saw my embarrassment and encouraged independent study courses — one of several life savers. Simple things like — actually getting glasses . . .

Parents who encourage education. Safe environments, encouraging environments matter. There’s not much the system can do about parents directly. But there’s is plenty they can do about safe schools, demanding more than can be accomplished as practice, academic environments as opposed to emotional and psychological safety.

No one has to go to school with white kids or yellow kids or black kids, or brown kids or green kids to learn decent social behavioral skills or latin, french, math, english, history and science.

The Brown case clearly established that the separate but equal practiced was in fact not equal. Had it been – equal, I would have shrugged my shoulders.
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I have no solution for people who think academic and academic effectiveness is a white thing. Nor do I have an answer how to untangle such thinking from whites that being a US citizen and being proficient at the basics or more is somehow white.

But I am absolutely committed to every citizen demonstrating that they are in fact a citizen to vote. And n one of that disenfranchising nonsense. Blacks have been getting ID’s since social security was expected. They were needed to deposit funds, get funds, cash checks, etc.

Blacks above everyone else should demand every citizen be able to have evidence of the same.

“What should be done for the least proficient, lowest income children”

You can help them however you like. Robbing your fellow Americans, making them poorer and less able to educate their own children, because you feel entitled to their money under the pretense of “caring” isn’t anything to be proud of. It’s a shameful act for which you should feel ashamed. Further, the historical record is clear as day: if you want to destroy the educational opportunities of “the least proficient, lowest income children”, create a government monopoly on education.

“I think most of us recognize that no school system alone is capable of curing these educational problems, social pathologies, and gross economic disparities.”

All educated people know NO school system can ever eliminate disparities. People like you are funny, though. Your constant refrain is “diversity is our strength”, then set about using the violent power of the police state to try to eliminate all diversity in education, income, health, etc.

“Have you, Sir, thought of any remedies for these children as well? If so, what are they?”

Leave them be to make their own choices for their own lives. Stop being such a racist, pretending you know better for black people than they know for themselves.

“All educated people know NO school system can ever eliminate disparities. People like you are funny, though. Your constant refrain is “diversity is our strength” . . .”

But it can and should have downward pressure on disparities so that are artificially created. One of the benefits of education is that it provides skills that enable our people – citizens – to succeed, regardless of their differences. And to that, I don’t think we can pretend that people with resources have leveraged the system to make sure they retained against those that don’t.

It’s hard to respond to the issues of diversity without defining the term. Diversity of color is benign and has no impact in and of itself. Other areas of diversity, language, ethnicity, ethical standards, social norms, academic background and nationality . . . are not benign. The costs of illegal immigration on education is negative in every way. That is a diverse component that we should no longer accommodate.